Laws K R, Evans J J, Hodges J R, McCarthy R A
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, UK.
Memory. 1995 Sep-Dec;3(3-4):409-33. doi: 10.1080/09658219508253159.
This study describes a patient (SE) with temporal lobe injury resulting from Herpes Simplex Encephalitis, who displayed a previously unreported impairment in which his knowledge of associative and functional attributes of animals was disproportionately impaired by comparison with his knowledge of their sensory attributes (including their visual properties and characteristic sounds). His knowledge of man-made objects was preserved. A striking aspect of the present case was that the patient remained able to name many animals from their pictures, despite making gross errors in generating associative information about these same animals. This suggests that a semantic representation incorporating stored sensory knowledge may be sufficient for naming (at least for biological categories) and associative information may be unnecessary. Semantic knowledge may normally incorporate more information than is necessary for identification. SE's errors were found to be confabulatory and reconstructive in nature and it is argued that this aspect of his performance challenges passive conceptions of semantic memory couched in terms of a catalogue of stored representations. It is proposed that the patient's disorder affects a dynamic, constructive, and inferential component of his knowledge base, and that this component is sensitive to semantic category.
本研究描述了一名因单纯疱疹性脑炎导致颞叶损伤的患者（SE），该患者表现出一种此前未被报道的损伤，即与对动物感官属性（包括视觉特征和特征声音）的了解相比，其对动物联想和功能属性的了解受到了不成比例的损害。他对人造物体的认知保持完好。本病例的一个显著特点是，尽管患者在生成关于这些动物的联想信息时犯了严重错误，但仍能从图片中说出许多动物的名称。这表明，包含存储感官知识的语义表征可能足以进行命名（至少对于生物类别而言），而联想信息可能并非必要。语义知识通常可能包含比识别所需更多的信息。发现SE的错误在本质上具有虚构和重构性，有人认为他这方面的表现挑战了以存储表征目录为基础的语义记忆被动概念。有人提出，患者的病症影响了其知识库中动态、建设性和推理的成分，并且该成分对语义类别敏感。
